Hitler A Biography

ASIN: B00BJIMCA8“Magisterial . . . anyone who wishes to understand the Third Reich must read Kershaw.”—Niall Ferguson.“The Hitler biography of the twenty-first century” (Richard J. Evans), Ian Kershaw’s Hitler is a one-volume masterpiece that will become the standard work. From Hitler’s origins as a failed artist in fin-de-siècle Vienna to the terrifying last days in his Berlin bunker, Kershaw’s richly illustrated biography is a mesmerizing portrait of how Hitler attained, exercised, and retained power. Drawing on previously untapped sources, such as Goebbels’s diaries, Kershaw addresses the crucial questions about the unique nature of Nazi radicalism, about the Holocaust, and about the poisoned European world that allowed Hitler to operate so effectively.

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HITLER
IAN KERSHAW is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. For services to history he was given the German award of the Federal Cross of Merit in 1994. He was knighted in 2002 and awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2004.
He was the historical adviser to three BBC series: The Nazis: A Warning from History, War of the Century and Auschwitz.
His most recent books are Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, which received the Wolfson Literary Award for History and the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for the Political Book of the Year, and was joint winner of the inaugrual British Academy Book Prize; Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War, which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography in 2005; and Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940–41.
Epilogue
I
Hitler was dead. Only the last obsequies remained. They would not detain the inhabitants of the bunker for long. The man who, living, had dominated their existence to the last was now merely a corpse to be disposed of as rapidly as possible. With the Russians at the portals of the Reich Chancellery, the bunker inmates had thoughts other than their dead leader on their minds.
Within minutes of the deaths being established, the bodies of Adolf Hitler and his wife of a day-and-a-half, Eva Braun, were wrapped in the blankets that Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, had quickly fetched. The corpses were then lifted from the sofa and carried through the bunker, up twenty-five feet or so of stairs, and into the garden of the Reich Chancellery. Linge, helped by three SS guards, brought out the remains of Hitler, head covered by the blanket, his lower legs protruding. Martin Bormann carried Eva Braun’s body into the corridor, where Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, relieved him of his burden. Otto Günsche, Hitler’s personal adjutant, and commissioned with overseeing the burning of the bodies, then took over on the stairs and carried Eva Braun up into the garden. He laid the bodies side by side, Eva Braun to Hitler’s right, on a piece of flat, open, sandy ground only about three metres from the door down to the bunker. It was impossible to look around for any more suitable spot. Even this location, close to the bunker door, was extremely hazardous, since an unceasing rain of shells from the Soviet barrage continued to bombard the whole area, including the garden itself. General Hans Krebs, Hitler’s last Chief of the General Staff, Wilhelm Burgdorf, his Wehrmacht adjutant, Joseph Goebbels, newly appointed Chancellor of what was left of the Reich, and Martin Bormann, now designated Party Minister, had followed the small cortège and joined the extraordinary funeral party witnessing the macabre scene.
A good store of petrol had been gathered in the bunker in readiness. Kempka had himself provided, at Günsche’s request, as much as 200 litres. More was stored in the bunker’s machine-room. The petrol was now swiftly poured over the bodies. Nonetheless, as the hail of shells continued, setting the funeral pyre alight with the matches Goebbels supplied proved difficult. Günsche was about to try with a grenade, when Linge managed to find some paper to make a torch. Bormann was finally able to get it burning, and either he or Linge hurled it on to the pyre, immediately retreating to the safety of the doorway. Someone rapidly closed the bunker door, leaving open only a small crevice, through which a ball of fire was seen to erupt around the petrol-soaked bodies. Arms briefly raised in a final ‘Heil Hitler’ salute, the tiny funeral party hurriedly departed underground, away from the danger of the exploding shells. As the flames consumed the bodies in a suitably infernal setting, the end of the leader whose presence had a mere few years earlier electrified millions was witnessed by not a single one even of his closest followers.
Neither Linge nor Günsche, the two men entrusted by Hitler with the disposal of the bodies, returned to ensure that the task was complete. One of the guards in the Chancellery garden, Hermann Karnau, later testified (though, like a number of the witnesses in the bunker, he gave contradictory versions at different times) that, when he revisited the cremation site, the bodies had been reduced to little more than ashes, which collapsed when he touched them with his foot. Another guard, Erich Mansfeld, recalled that he had viewed the scene together with Karnau around 6 p.m. Karnau had shouted to him that it was all over. When they went across together, they found two charcoaled, shrivelled, unrecognizable bodies. Günsche himself told of commissioning, around half an hour after returning from the cremation, two SS men from the Führer Escort Squad (Führerbegleitkommando), Hauptsturmführer Ewald Lindloff and Obersturmführer Hans Reisser, with ensuring that the remains of the bodies were buried. Lindloff later reported that he had carried out the order. The bodies, he said, had been already thoroughly burnt and were in a ‘shocking state’, torn open – Günsche presumed – in the heavy bombardment of the garden. Reisser’s involvement was not needed. Günsche told him, an hour and a half after giving him the order, that Lindloff had already carried it out. It was by this time no later than 6.30 p.m. on 30 April.
There had been little left of Hitler and Eva Braun for Lindloff to dispose of. Their few mortal remains joined those of numerous other unidentifiable bodies (or parts of them), some from the hospital below the New Reich Chancellery, which had rapidly been thrown into bomb-craters in the vicinity of the bunker exit during the previous days. The intense bombardment which continued for a further twenty-four hours or so played its own part in destroying and scattering the human remains strewn around the Chancellery garden.
When the Soviet victors arrived there on 2 May they immediately began a vigorous search for the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Nine days later, they showed the dental technician Fritz Echtmann, who had worked for Hitler’s dentist, Dr Johann Hugo Blaschke, since 1938, part of a jaw-bone and two dental bridges. He was able to identify from his records one of the bridges as that of Hitler, the other as Eva Braun’s. The lower jaw-bone, too, was Hitler’s. These earthly remains of the once all-powerful ruler of Germany were subsequently taken to Moscow and kept in a cigar-box. Part of a skull with a bullet-hole in it, thought to be Hitler’s, was discovered in 1946 and also found its way to Moscow. The other presumed remains of Hitler and Eva Braun – what, exactly, the Soviets found is still unclear – were deposited initially in an unmarked grave in a forest far to the west of Berlin, reburied in 1946 in a plot of land in Magdeburg, then finally exhumed and burnt in 1970.
II
The bunker inmates were finally free to think of their own survival. Even while the bodies still burned in the Chancellery garden above, they had forgotten their vows of self-immolation alongside their leader and were agreeing to do what he had always and explicitly ruled out: seek a last-minute arrangement with the Soviet Union. An emissary was sent out under a white flag to try to engineer a meeting of General Krebs (who, as a former military attaché in Moscow, had the advantage of speaking fluent Russian) with Marshal Zhukov. At 10 p.m. that evening, Krebs went over the Soviet lines bearing a letter from Goebbels and Bormann.
It was an anxious night for those incarcerated in the bunker. And when Krebs returned around 6 a.m. next morning it was only to report that the Soviet side insisted upon unconditional surrender and demanded a declaration to that effect by 4 p.m. that afternoon, 1 May.
This was the end. It was time for final preparations – on the sole remaining principle of save what can be saved. At 10.53 a.m., a telegram for Dönitz arrived in Plön: ‘Testament in force. I’ll come to you as quickly as possible. Until then, in my view, hold back from publication. Bormann.’ Earlier that morning, more than nine hours after the grotesque scene in the Chancellery garden, the Grand-Admiral, still believing Hitler was alive, had telegraphed an expression of his continued unconditional loyalty to the bunker. Only now did he realize that Hitler was dead. This was confirmed in a further telegram – the last to leave the bunker – dictated by Goebbels and arriving at Plön at 3.18 p.m. that afternoon. Neither the Wehrmacht nor the German people were as yet aware of Hitler’s death. When they were finally told, seven hours later, in a broadcast at 10.26 p.m. that night, it was, typically, with a double distortion of the truth: that Hitler had died that afternoon – it was the previous day – and that his death had taken place in combat ‘at his post in the Reich Chancellery, while fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism’. In his proclamation to the Wehrmacht, Dönitz spoke of the Führer’s ‘heroic death’. The Wehrmacht’s report stated that he had fallen ‘at the head of the heroic defenders of the Reich capital’. The delay in informing Dönitz had plainly been to allow Bormann and Goebbels the final opportunity of a negotiated surrender to the Red Army without consulting the new head of state. The untruth relayed by Dönitz to the Wehrmacht and German people was to prevent a predictable response by the troops, had they been aware of Hitler’s suicide, that the Führer had deserted them at the last. This was, in fact, precisely the message which General Helmuth Weidling, the German commander in Berlin, conveyed to his troops when ordering them, in the early hours of 2 May, to cease fighting. ‘On 30.4.45 the Führer took his own life and thereby abandoned those who had sworn him loyalty,’ ran the order. ‘At the Führer’s command you believe that you must still fight for Berlin, although the lack of heavy weaponry and munitions, and the overall situation shows the struggle to be pointless … In agreement with the High Command of the Soviet troops, I therefore demand you to end the fighting immediately.’
By then, the drama in the bunker was finally over. Most of those still entombed below the Reich Chancellery had spent the afternoon and evening of 1 May planning their break-out. Goebbels was not among them. Along with his wife, Magda, he was now making arrangements for their own suicides – and for taking the lives of their six children. In the early evening, Magda summoned Helmut Gustav Kunz, adjutant to the head doctor in the SS medical administration in the Reich Chancellery, and asked him to give each of the children – Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, and Heide, aged between twelve and four – a shot of morphine. It was about 8.40 p.m. when Kunz carried out the request. Once they had fallen into a drugged sleep, Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s own physician at the end, crushed a phial of prussic acid in the mouth of each of the children.
Later that evening, as Wilhelm Mohnke, commandant of the ‘Citadel’, gave orders for the mass break-out from the bunker, Goebbels instructed his adjutant, Günther Schwägermann, to take care of the burning of his and Magda’s bodies. He gave him the silver-framed signed photograph of Hitler that for so many years had stood on his desk as a memento. Then he and his wife, after saying their brief farewells, climbed the stairs to the Chancellery garden, and bit on the prussic acid capsules. An SS orderly fired two shots into the bodies to make sure. Far less petrol was available for the unceremonious cremation than had been saved for burning the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Soviet troops had little difficulty in identifying the corpses when they entered the Chancellery garden next day.
Krebs, Burgdorf, and Franz Schädle, head of Hitler’s escort squad, also chose to end their lives in the bunker before the Russians arrived. The rest of the company sought their luck late that evening in the mass escape, undertaken in groups. The underground railway tunnel brought them to Friedrichstraße station, a few hundred yards to the north of the ruined Reich Chancellery. But once on the surface, in the burning hell of Berlin, with shells falling all around, confusion took over. The groups found themselves split up in the chaos. Individuals took what chances they could. A few, including the secretaries Gerda Christian, Traudl Junge, and Else Krüger, managed, remarkably, to make their way through to the west. Most, among them Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge, fell into Soviet hands and years of misery and maltreatment in Moscow prisons. Most of the others were killed seeking a route to safety, or took the last decision left to them. Prominent among the latter were Hitler’s constant right hand during the war years, Martin Bormann, and his doctor, Ludwig Stumpfegger. Both had given up their hopes of escape and, rather than fall into Soviet hands, had swallowed poison in the early hours of 2 May 1945 in Berlin’s Invalidenstraße.
III
Outside Berlin, the winding-up orders on the Third Reich were meanwhile in the process of being served. However, they were carried out by the new Dönitz regime – based in Flensburg in the north of Schleswig-Holstein – with great reluctance, and only under the evident compulsion of the hopeless military situation. At the end of the First World War, disastrous though the defeat had been, it had proved possible to save the existence of the Reich and the German army. The basis for the hopes of national rebirth had been laid. Dönitz held to the illusion that this much might be achieved a second time. Even at this late hour, he was hoping through the offer of partial capitulation to the west to avoid total and unconditional surrender on all fronts, at the same time sustaining, with western backing, the German Reich to form, alongside the western powers, a common front against Bolshevism. For this, he needed to gain time – also to allow withdrawal to the west of as many as possible of the Wehrmacht troops still engaged in bitter fighting against the Red Army. He was ready to sanction, therefore, the German capitulation in northern Italy on 2 May, which had already been agreed between Himmler’s former right-hand man Karl Wolff and OSS chief Allen Dulles on the day before Hitler’s suicide. He also reluctantly conceded on 4 May a further partial capitulation involving German troops in north-west Germany, Holland, and Denmark. In the south, where the Americans reached Munich on the day of Hitler’s death, Innsbruck on 3 May, and Linz – Hitler’s home town – four days later, Kesselring negotiated the surrender of the German divisions in the northern Alps on the 5th and in Austria on 7 May. Dönitz did not, however, include in the partial capitulation the German troops further east, still fighting in Yugoslavia.
The Grand Admiral’s hopes of rescuing the remnants of Hitler’s Reich were visible in his choice of cabinet. Though he rejected Himmler’s overtures for inclusion, and turned his back, too, on Ribbentrop, he retained several members of Hitler’s cabinet, among them Albert Speer, while foreign affairs and the direction of the cabinet were placed in the hands of the long-standing finance minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who, it was presumed, would appear unsullied by the worst crimes of Nazism. He made no changes in the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Hitler’s mainstays, Keitel and Jodl, were left in post. The Nazi Party was neither banned nor dissolved. Pictures of Hitler still adorned the walls of government offices in Flensburg. One of the few concessions that Dönitz made was the reintroduction of the military salute in the Wehrmacht to replace the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting. But military courts continued to hand out death-sentences even as the last rites on the Third Reich were being pronounced.
The tactics employed by Dönitz were at least successful in enabling an estimated 1.8 million German soldiers to avoid Soviet captivity by surrendering to the western Allies – though at a high cost of continuing bloodshed and suffering before the fighting could be finally terminated. While the eastern front had since 1941 been the main theatre of war, under a third of the 10 million or so German prisoners-of-war fell into Soviet hands. But Dönitz’s intentions of a one-sided, partial capitulation to win the West at this late stage to the defence against Bolshevism cut little ice with Allied leaders. When his envoy (and successor as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy) Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg journeyed with a delegation to Rheims, Eisenhower’s headquarters, hoping to seal an agreement with the western Allies amounting to a capitulation to the West, but not to the Soviet Union, Eisenhower was having none of it. He insisted on a full and unconditional surrender on all fronts. Accordingly, on 6 May, Dönitz sent Jodl to Rheims on seemingly the same mission – to persuade the West to accept German surrender, but to avoid total capitulation – though this time with powers to agree to a complete capitulation (following final authorization from Flensburg) and instructions to gain maximum time – at least four days – in order to bring back the largest German fighting unit still in combat, Army Group Centre, across American lines. Eisenhower remained unmoved. He insisted on the capitulation being signed that very day, 6 May, with effect from midnight on 9 May, and threatened a renewal of air-raids if the agreement were not forthcoming. Jodl was given half an hour to think it over. After difficulties in communication with Flensburg, Dönitz, faced with no alternative, eventually conceded his authorization in the early hours. At 2.41 a.m. on 7 May, in the presence of representatives of all four of the Allied powers, the capitulation was signed, stipulating a complete ending of all German military engagements by the end of the following day.
The document to which the signatures were appended was, however, a shortened version of the original text of surrender, agreed by all the Allies. It was, in fact, regarded by the OKW leadership as ‘not final’, and to be replaced by ‘a general capitulation treaty’ still to be signed. Meanwhile, the order had gone out to bring back as many troops and as speedily as possible to the west for surrender to the British and Americans. At Stalin’s insistence, Allied representatives assembled once more, on 9 May, just after midnight, this time at Karlshorst on the outskirts of Berlin, headquarters of Marshal Zhukov, to sign the full document of capitulation. Since the terms agreed at Rheims had already come into effect a few minutes earlier, the document was dated 8 May. Keitel, Friedeburg, and Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff (representing the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Ritter von Greim) signed from the German side. Zhukov, the British Air-Marshal Arthur W. Tedder (representing Eisenhower), the French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, and the US General Carl Spaatz signed for the Allies.
The last Wehrmacht report, on 9 May 1945, retained a tone of pride, speaking of ‘the unique achievement of front and homeland’ which would ‘in a later, just verdict of history find its final appreciation’. These words, hollow for millions, followed the declaration: ‘On command of the Grand Admiral the Wehrmacht has stopped the fight which had become hopeless. The struggle lasting almost six years is accordingly at an end.’
Hitler’s war was over. The reckoning was about to begin.
IV
Many of those bearing heaviest responsibility, after Hitler, for the terrible suffering of the previous years and the deep pall of sorrow left behind escaped full retribution. Suicide, Hitler had always said, was easy. Some of his leading henchmen now followed his example. Heinrich Himmler, the embodiment of police terror, captured by the British under false identity and wearing the uniform of a Wehrmacht sergeant, crunched a phial of potassium cyanide in an interrogation centre near Lüneburg on 23 May as soon as his true identity had been established. Robert Ley, the stridently antisemitic head of the German Labour Front, taken by American troops in the mountains of the Tyrol, strangled himself in the lavatory of his prison cell at Nuremberg on 24 October while awaiting trial. Arrested by US forces near Berchtesgaden on 9 May 1945, Hermann Göring, for so long Hitler’s designated successor until his abrupt dismissal in the last days of the Third Reich, also committed suicide – cheating the hangman awaiting his presence next day on the late evening of 15 October 1946 after being convicted on all charges, including crimes against humanity, at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
Others among the regime’s leaders, unwilling or unable to end their own lives, suffered the fate imposed upon them by the Tribunal and were hanged at Nuremberg. Convicted for crimes against humanity – in all but one case war crimes, and in some instances conspiracy to commit or actual commission of crimes against peace – the warmongering former Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht Wilhelm Keitel; head of the Operations Department of the Wehrmacht and Hitler’s chief military adviser Alfred Jodl; Nazi ideological guru and Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg; Reich Minister of the Interior (until his removal from office in 1943) Wilhelm Frick; Hitler’s key man in Vienna at the time of the Anschluß and later Reich Commissar in the Netherlands Arthur Seyß-Inquart; Labour Plenipotentiary Fritz Sauckel, who presided over the slave-labour programme; Heydrich’s fearsome successor as head of the RSHA Ernst Kaltenbrunner; Governor-General of Poland and leading Nazi lawyer Hans Frank; and the former Gauleiter of Franconia, leading Jew-baiter Julius Streicher were executed on 16 October 1946. Few mourned them.
Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister whose hands were barely less dirty than Sauckel’s in the exploitation of forced labour, was one of those fortunate to escape the hangman’s noose. Like the last head of state Admiral Dönitz, Economics Minister Walther Funk, Foreign Minister (until his replacement by Ribbentrop in 1938) Konstantin von Neurath, head of the navy Erich Raeder, long-time Hitler Youth leader and Gauleiter of Vienna Baldur von Schirach, and (until his flight to Scotland in 1941) deputy head of the Nazi Party Rudolf Heß, Speer was given a long prison sentence. Funk, Neurath, and Raeder were released early on health grounds. Dönitz, Speer, and Schirach left prison each after serving the full sentence – in Speer’s case to become a celebrity, best-selling author, and pundit on the Third Reich with a belated guilt complex as his trademark. Heß was to commit suicide in 1987, still serving a life-sentence in Spandau prison in Berlin.
Among second-ranking Nazis implicated in the regime’s most heinous crimes, the most notorious, the manager of the ‘Final Solution’ Adolf Eichmann, was to be dramatically abducted from Argentina by Israeli agents, tried in Jerusalem, and hanged in 1962. The commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höß, the butcher of the Warsaw ghetto Jürgen Stroop, the terror of the Poles in the Warthegau Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, and his scarcely less fanatical counterpart in Danzig-West Prussia Albert Forster were all hanged at earlier dates after trials in Poland. The Poles proved more humanitarian than their previous tormentors in commuting, on account of his poor health, the death-sentence on the notably (even by Nazi standards) cruel and brutal former Gauleiter of East Prussia Erich Koch to a term of life-imprisonment.
Many implicated in crimes against humanity escaped lightly. Hinrich Lohse, former Reich Commissar in the Baltic, was released in 1951 on grounds of ill-health after serving only three years of a ten-year sentence. He died peacefully in his home town in 1964. Wilhelm Koppe, SS leader in the Warthegau and alongside Greiser the instigator of Chelmno extermination camp, where over 150,000 Jews lost their lives, was able to prosper under a pseudonym as the director of a chocolate factory in Bonn until the 1960s. When discovered and arraigned for his part in mass murder in Poland he was deemed unfit to stand trial, eventually dying in his bed in 1975. Countless others, who in ‘working towards the Führer’ had exercised positions of great power, often determining life or death (including doctors implicated in the ‘euthanasia action’) and lining their own pockets at the same time through boundless corruption and ruthless careerism, were able wholly or in part to avoid serious retribution for their actions – in some cases building successful post-war careers for themselves.
Few of those forced to account for their actions under Hitler showed remorse or contrition, let alone guilt. With scant exception, they showed themselves, when called to book, incapable of acknowledging their own contribution to the remorseless slide into barbarism during the Nazi era. Alongside the inevitable lies, distortions, and excuses often went, it seems, a psychological block on recognizing responsibility for their actions. It amounted to a self-deception that mirrored the total collapse of their value-system and the demolition of the idealized image of Hitler to which they had clung for so many years – which, indeed, had usually underpinned or at least given justification for their motivation. They had been content for years to see their power, careers, ambitions, aspirations depend solely on Hitler. Now, it was in a perverse sense logical that their own plight would be attributed solely to what they saw as Hitler’s lunacy and criminality. From being the revered leader whose utopian vision they had eagerly followed, Hitler was now the scapegoat who had betrayed their trust and seduced them through the brilliance of his rhetoric into becoming helpless accomplices to his barbaric plans.
Such a psychology applied not merely to many of those most heavily incriminated in the Nazi experiment to determine who should inhabit this planet. Countless ordinary Germans were now prepared to find an explanation for or defence of their own actions (or lack of action) in the alleged seductive powers of Hitler – a leader promising salvation but in the end delivering damnation. Alternatively, they looked to a level of totalitarian terror that had left them with no alternative but to follow orders of which they disapproved. Both responses were wide of the mark.
Hitler’s regime, as we have had ample cause to acknowledge, was – certainly for most of its twelve-year duration – no narrowly based tyranny imposing its will upon the hostile masses of the population. And, until the ‘running amok’ of the last phase of the war, the terror – at least within Germany – had been specifically targeted at defined racial and political enemies, not random and arbitrary, while the level of at least partial consensus in all reaches of society had been extensive. Generalizations about the mentalities and behaviour of millions of Germans in the Nazi era are bound to be of limited application – apart, perhaps, from the generalization that, for the great mass of the population, the figurative colours to look for are less likely to be stark black and white than varying and chequered shades of grey. Even so, it remains the case that, collectively, the inhabitants of a highly modern, sophisticated, pluralistic society which, following a lost war, was experiencing deep-seated national humiliation, economic bankruptcy, acute social, political, and ideological polarization, and a generally perceived complete failure of a discredited political system, had been prepared in increasing numbers to place their trust in the chiliastic vision of a self-professed political saviour. Once, as can now more easily be seen, a series of relatively cheap and easy (though in reality exceedingly dangerous) national triumphs had been achieved, still further vast numbers were prepared to swallow their doubts and to believe in the destiny of their great leader. Moreover, these triumphs, however much they were portrayed by propaganda as attributable to the achievements of one man, had been brought about not only with huge mass acclaim, but also with a very high level of support from almost all of the non-Nazi élite-groups – business, industry, civil service, above all the armed forces – which controlled practically every avenue of power outside the upper echelons of the Nazi Movement itself. Though the consensus was in many respects a shallow one, resting upon differing degrees of backing for the various strands of the overall ideological vision which Hitler embodied, it offered nevertheless until the middle of the war an extremely wide and potent platform of support for Hitler to build upon and exploit.
The rise from the depths of national degradation to the heights of national greatness seemed for so many (as propaganda never ceased to trumpet) to be a near-miracle – a work of redemption brought about by the unique genius of the Führer. Hitler’s power was able thereby to draw on strong elements of pseudo-religious belief translated into the mysticism of national salvation and rebirth – emanating in part no doubt from declining institutional religion and from the psychologically needed substitution in some quarters for the quasi-religious associations with the monarchy – which also compensated in some ways for the many negative aspects of everyday life under Nazi rule. Even to the very end there were intelligent individuals prepared to exempt Hitler from knowledge of the atrocities committed in Poland and Russia – and to attach blame instead to Himmler. The Führer cult, accepted not only by millions of believers but pandered to in their own interests by all in positions of authority and influence, even if they were often inwardly critical or sceptical, enabled Hitler’s power to shake off all constraints and become absolute. By the time realization dawned that the road to riches was proving the road to ruin, the personalized rule of the leader was out of control. Hitler was by now – though this had not always been so – incapable of being checked by the splintered parts of an increasingly fragmented regime bound together largely by the commitment to the ruler himself and, increasingly, fear of the alternative: Bolshevism. The road to perdition lay open, but – other than the courageous attempts by small groups or individuals which ultimately failed through bad luck even more than through bad planning – there was by now little alternative but to follow this road.
The price to be paid – by the German people, above all by the regime’s untold numbers of victims inside and outside Germany – was beyond calculation. The material price was immense. Writing to The Times on 12 November 1945, the left-wing British Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz described his impressions in Düsseldorf: ‘I am never likely to forget the unspeakable wickedness of which the Nazis were guilty. But when I see the swollen bodies and living skeletons in hospitals here and elsewhere … then I think, not of Germans, but of men and women. I am sure I should have the same feelings if I were in Greece or Poland. But I happen to be in Germany, and write of what I see here.’ The moral price was, if anything, even more immeasurable. Decades would not fully erase the simple but compelling sentiment painted in huge letters at the scene of Hitler’s annual celebration of the 1923 putsch, the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, in May 1945: ‘I am ashamed to be a German.’ ‘Europe has never known such a calamity to her civilization and nobody can say when she will begin to recover from its effects,’ was the telling and at the same time prophetic comment of one British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, only three days after the suicide in the bunker. The trauma which was Hitler’s lasting legacy was only just beginning.
V
Never in history has such ruination – physical and moral – been associated with the name of one man. That the ruination had far deeper roots and far more profound causes than the aims and actions of this one man has been evident in the preceding chapters. That the previously unprobed depths of inhumanity plumbed by the Nazi regime could draw upon wide-ranging complicity at all levels of society has been equally apparent. But Hitler’s name justifiably stands for all time as that of the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times. The extreme form of personal rule which an ill-educated beerhall demagogue and racist bigot, a narcissistic, megalomaniac, self-styled national saviour, was allowed to acquire and exercise in a modern, economically advanced, and cultured land known for its philosophers and poets was absolutely decisive in the terrible unfolding of events in those fateful twelve years.
Hitler was the main author of a war leaving over 50 million dead and millions more grieving their lost ones and trying to put their shattered lives together again. Hitler was the chief inspiration of a genocide the like of which the world had never known, rightly to be viewed in coming times as a defining episode of the twentieth century. The Reich whose glory he had sought lay at the end wrecked, its remnants to be divided among the victorious and occupying powers. The arch-enemy, Bolshevism, stood in the Reich capital itself and presided over half of Europe. Even the German people, whose survival he had said was the very reason for his political fight, had proved ultimately dispensable to him.
In the event, the German people he was prepared to see damned alongside him proved capable of surviving even a Hitler. Beyond the repairing of broken lives and broken homes in broken towns and cities, the searing moral imprint of Hitler’s era would remain. Gradually, nevertheless, a new society, resting in time, mercifully, on new values, would emerge from the ruins of the old. For in its maelstrom of destruction Hitler’s rule had also conclusively demonstrated the utter bankruptcy of the hyper-nationalistic and racist world-power ambitions (and the social and political structures that upheld them) that had prevailed in Germany over the previous half a century and twice taken Europe and the wider world into calamitous war.
The old Germany was gone with Hitler. The Germany which had produced Adolf Hitler, had seen its future in his vision, had so readily served him, and had shared in his hubris, had also to share his nemesis.
Main Published Primary Sources on Hitler
Adolf Hitler: Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941–1944. Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims, ed. Werner Jochmann, Hamburg, 1980 (Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, introd. by H. R. Trevor-Roper, London, 1953).
Akten der Partei-Kanzlei, ed. Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 4 vols, Munich, 1983–92.
Akten der Reichskanzlei. Die Regierung Hitler 1933–1938, 4 vols, Boppard/Munich, 1983–99.
Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945. (Serie D: 1.9.37–11.12.41; Serie E: 1941–1945).
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1
Fantasy and Failure
I
The first of many strokes of good fortune for Adolf Hitler took place thirteen years before he was born. In 1876, the man who was to become his father changed his name from Alois Schicklgruber to Alois Hitler. Adolf can be believed when he said that nothing his father had done had pleased him so much as to drop the coarsely rustic name of Schicklgruber. Certainly, ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ would have sounded an unlikely salutation to a national hero.
The Schicklgrubers had for generations been a peasant family, smallholders in the Waldviertel, a picturesque but poor, hilly and (as the name suggests) woody area in the most north-westerly part of Lower Austria, bordering on Bohemia, whose inhabitants had something of a reputation for being dour, hard-nosed, and unwelcoming. Hitler’s father, Alois, had been born there on 7 June 1837, in the village of Strones, as the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, then forty-one years old and daughter of a poor smallholder, Johann Schicklgruber, and baptized (as Aloys Schicklgruber) in nearby Döllersheim the same day.
Hitler’s father was the first social climber in his family. In 1855, by the time he was eighteen, Alois had gained employment at a modest grade with the Austrian ministry of finance. For a young man of his background and limited education, his advancement in the years to come was impressive. After training, and passing the necessary examination, he attained low-ranking supervisory status in 1861 and a position in the customs service in 1864, becoming a customs officer in 1870 before moving the following year to Braunau am Inn, and attaining the post of customs inspector there in 1875.
A year later came the change of name. Alois, the social climber, may have preferred the less rustic form of ‘Hitler’ (a variant spelling of ‘Hiedler’, otherwise given as ‘Hietler’, Hüttler’, ‘Hütler’, meaning ‘smallholder’, the surname of Johann Georg Hiedler, who had later married Alois’s mother, apparently acknowledging paternity). At any rate, Alois seemed well satisfied with his new name, and from the final authorization in January 1877 always signed himself ‘Alois Hitler’. His son was equally pleased with the more distinctive form ‘Hitler’.
Klara Pölzl, who was to become Adolf Hitler’s mother, was the eldest of only three surviving children out of eleven – the other two were Johanna and Theresia – from the marriage of Johanna Hüttler, eldest daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, with Johann Baptist Pölzl, also a smallholder in Spital. Klara herself grew up on the adjacent farm to that of her grandfather Nepomuk. At the death of his brother, Johann Georg Hiedler, Nepomuk had effectively adopted Alois Schicklgruber. Klara’s mother, Johanna, and her aunt Walburga had in fact been brought up with Alois in Nepomuk’s house. Officially, after the change of name and legitimation in 1876, Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl were second cousins. In that year, 1876, aged sixteen, Klara Pölzl left the family farm in Spital and moved to Braunau am Inn to join the household of Alois Hitler as a maid.
By this time, Alois was a well-respected customs official in Braunau. His personal affairs were, however, less well regulated than his career. He would eventually marry three times, at first to a woman much older than himself, Anna Glasserl, from whom he separated in 1880, then to women young enough to be his daughters. A premarital liaison and his last two marriages would give him nine children, four of whom were to die in infancy. It was a private life of above average turbulence – at least for a provincial customs officer. When his second wife, Franziska (Fanni) Matzelberger, died of tuberculosis in August 1884 aged only twenty-three, their two children, Alois and Angela, were still tiny. During her illness, Fanni had been moved to the fresh air of the countryside outside Braunau. For someone to look after his two young children, Alois turned straight away to Klara Pölzl, and brought her back to Braunau. With Fanni scarcely in her grave, Klara became pregnant. Since they were officially second cousins, a marriage between Alois and Klara needed the dispensation of the Church. After a wait of four months, in which Klara’s condition became all the more evident, the dispensation finally arrived from Rome in late 1884, and the couple were married on 7 January 1885. The wedding ceremony took place at six o’clock in the morning. Soon after a perfunctory celebration, Alois was back at his work at the customs post.
The first of the children of Alois’s third marriage, Gustav, was born in May 1885, to be followed in September the following year by a second child, Ida, and, with scarcely a respite, by another son, Otto, who died only days after his birth. Further tragedy for Klara came soon afterwards, as both Gustav and Ida contracted diphtheria and died within weeks of each other in December 1887 and January 1888. By the summer of 1888 Klara was pregnant again. At half-past six in the evening on 20 April 1889, an overcast and chilly Easter Saturday, she gave birth in her home in the ‘Gasthof zum Pommer’, Vorstadt Nr.219, to her fourth child, the first to survive infancy: this was Adolf.
The historical record of Adolf ’s early years is very sparse. His own account in Mein Kampf is inaccurate in detail and coloured in interpretation. Post-war recollections of family and acquaintances have to be treated with care, and are at times as dubious as the attempts during the Third Reich itself to glorify the childhood of the future Führer. For the formative period so important to psychologists and ‘psycho-historians’, the fact has to be faced that there is little to go on which is not retrospective guesswork.
By the time of Adolf ’s birth, Alois was a man of moderate means. His income was a solid one – rather more than that of an elementary school headmaster. In addition to Alois, Klara, the two children of Alois’s second marriage, Alois Jr (before he left home in 1896) and Angela, Adolf, and his younger brother Edmund (born in 1894, but died in 1900) and sister Paula (born in 1896), the household also ran to a cook and maid, Rosalia Schichtl. In addition, there was Adolf ’s aunt Johanna, one of his mother’s younger sisters, a bad-tempered, hunchbacked woman who was, however, fond of Adolf and a good help for Klara around the house. In material terms, then, the Hitler family led a comfortable middle-class existence.
Family life was, however, less than harmonious and happy. Alois was an archetypal provincial civil servant – pompous, status-proud, strict, humourless, frugal, pedantically punctual, and devoted to duty. He was regarded with respect by the local community. But he had a bad temper which could flare up quite unpredictably. At home, Alois was an authoritarian, overbearing, domineering husband and a stern, distant, masterful, and often irritable father. For long after their marriage, Klara could not get out of the habit of calling him ‘Uncle’. And even after his death, she kept a rack of his pipes in the kitchen and would point to them on occasion when he was referred to, as if to invoke his authority.
What affection the young children missed in their father was more than recompensed by their mother. According to the description given much later by her Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, after his own forced emigration from Nazi Germany, Klara Hitler was ‘a simple, modest, kindly woman. She was tall, had brownish hair which she kept neatly plaited, and a long, oval face with beautifully expressive grey-blue eyes.’ In personality, she was submissive, retiring, quiet, a pious churchgoer, taken up in the running of the household, and above all absorbed in the care of her children and stepchildren. The deaths within weeks of each other of her first three children in infancy in 1887–8, and the subsequent death of her fifth child, Edmund, under the age of six in 1900, must have been hammer blows for her. Her sorrows can only have been compounded by living with an irascible, unfeeling, overbearing husband. It is scarcely surprising that she made an impression of a saddened, careworn woman. Nor is it any wonder that she bestowed a smothering, protective love and devotion on her two surviving children, Adolf and Paula. Klara was in turn held in love and affection by her children and stepchildren, by Adolf quite especially. ‘Outwardly, his love for his mother was his most striking feature,’ Dr Bloch later wrote. ‘While he was not a “mother’s boy” in the usual sense,’ he added, ‘I have never witnessed a closer attachment.’ In one of the few signs of human affection recorded in Mein Kampf, Adolf wrote, ‘I had honoured my father, but loved my mother.’ He carried her picture with him down to the last days in the bunker. Her portrait stood in his rooms in Munich, Berlin, and at the Obersalzberg (his alpine residence near Berchtesgaden). His mother may well, in fact, have been the only person he genuinely loved in his entire life.
Adolf ’s early years were spent, then, under the suffocating shield of an over-anxious mother in a household dominated by the threatening presence of a disciplinarian father, against whose wrath the submissive Klara was helpless to protect her offspring. Adolf ’s younger sister, Paula, spoke after the war of her mother as ‘a very soft and tender person, the compensatory element between the almost too harsh father and the very lively children who were perhaps somewhat difficult to train. If there were ever quarrel[s] or differences of opinion between my parents,’ she continued, ‘it was always on account of the children. It was especially my brother Adolf who challenged my father to extreme harshness and who got his sound thrashing every day … How often on the other hand did my mother caress him and try to obtain with her kindness what the father could not succeed [in obtaining] with harshness!’ Hitler himself, during his late-night fireside monologues in the 1940s, often recounted that his father had sudden bursts of temper and would then immediately hit out. He did not love his father, he said, but instead feared him all the more. His poor beloved mother, he used to remark, to whom he was so attached, lived in constant concern about the beatings he had to take, sometimes waiting outside the door as he was thrashed.
Quite possibly, Alois’s violence was also turned against his wife. A passage in Mein Kampf, in which Hitler ostensibly describes the conditions in a workers’ family where the children have to witness drunken beatings of their mother by their father, may well have drawn in part on his own childhood experiences. What the legacy of all this was for the way Adolf’s character developed must remain a matter for speculation. That its impact was profound is hard to doubt.
Beneath the surface, the later Hitler was unquestionably being formed. Speculation though it must remain, it takes little to imagine that his later patronizing contempt for the submissiveness of women, the thirst for dominance (and imagery of the Leader as stern, authoritarian father-figure), the inability to form deep personal relationships, the corresponding cold brutality towards humankind, and – not least – the capacity for hatred so profound that it must have reflected an immeasurable undercurrent of self-hatred concealed in the extreme narcissism that was its counterpoint must surely have had roots in the subliminal influences of the young Adolf ’s family circumstances. But assumptions have to remain guesswork. The outer traces of Adolf ’s early life, so far as they can be reconstructed, bear no hint of what would emerge. Attempts to find in the youngster ‘the warped person within the murderous dictator’ have proved unpersuasive. If we exclude our knowledge of what was to come, his family circumstances invoke for the most part sympathy for the child exposed to them.
II
Alois Hitler had always been a restless soul. The Hitlers had moved house several times within Braunau, and had subsequently been uprooted on a number of occasions. In November 1898, a final move for Alois took place when he bought a house with a small plot of attached land in Leonding, a village on the outskirts of Linz. From now on, the family settled in the Linz area, and Adolf – down to his days in the bunker in 1945 – looked upon Linz as his home town. Linz reminded him of the happy, carefree days of his youth. It held associations with his mother. And it was the most ‘German’ town of the Austrian Empire. It evidently symbolized for him the provincial small-town Germanic idyll – the image he would throughout his life set against the city he would soon come to know, and detest: Vienna.
Adolf was now in his third elementary school. He seems to have established himself rapidly with a new set of schoolmates, and became ‘a little ringleader’ in the games of cops and robbers which the village boys played in the woods and fields around their homes. War games were a particular favourite. Adolf himself was thrilled by an illustrated history of the Franco-Prussian War, which he had come across at home. And once the Boer War broke out, the games revolved around the heroic exploits of the Boers, whom the village boys fervently supported. About this same time, Adolf became gripped by the adventure stories of Karl May, whose popular tales of the Wild West and Indian wars (though May had never been to America) enthralled thousands of youngsters. Most of these youngsters graduated from the Karl May adventures and the childhood fantasies they fostered as they grew up. For Adolf, however, the fascination with Karl May never faded. As Reich Chancellor, he still read the May stories, recommending them, too, to his generals, whom he accused of lacking imagination.
Adolf later referred to ‘this happy time’, when ‘school work was ridiculously easy, leaving me so much free time that the sun saw more of me than my room’, when ‘meadows and woods were then the battleground on which the ever-present “antagonisms” ’ – the growing conflict with his father – ‘came to a head’.
In 1900, however, the carefree days were drawing to a close. And just around the time when important decisions had to be made about Adolf ’s future, and the secondary education path he should follow, the Hitler family was once more plunged into distress with the death, through measles, of Adolf ’s little brother Edmund on 2 February 1900. With Alois’s elder son, Alois Jr, already spiting his father and living away from home, any careerist ambitions for his offspring now rested upon Adolf. They were to lead to tension between father and son in the remaining years of Alois’s life.
Adolf began his secondary schooling on 17 September 1900. His father had opted for the Realschule rather than the Gymnasium, that is, for a school which attached less weight to the traditional classical and humanistic studies but was still seen as a preparation for higher education, with an emphasis upon more ‘modern’ subjects, including science and technical studies. According to Adolf, his father was influenced by the aptitude his son already showed for drawing, together with a disdain for the impracticality of humanistic studies deriving from his own hard way to career advancement. It was not the typical route for a would-be civil servant – the career which Alois had in mind for his son. But, then, Alois himself had made a good career in the service of the Austrian state with hardly any formal education at all to speak of.
The transition to secondary school was a hard one for young Adolf. He had to trek every day from his home in Leonding to school in Linz, a journey of over an hour each way, leaving him little or no time for developing out-of-school friendships. While he was still a big fish in a little pond among the village boys in Leonding, his classmates in his new school took no special notice of him. He had no close friends at school; nor did he seek any. And the attention he had received from his village teacher was now replaced by the more impersonal treatment of a number of teachers responsible for individual subjects. The minimum effort with which Adolf had mastered the demands of the primary school now no longer sufficed. His school work, which had been so good in primary school, suffered from the outset. And his behaviour betrayed clear signs of immaturity. Adolf’s school record, down to the time he left in autumn 1905, hovered between poor and mediocre.
In a letter to Hitler’s defence counsel on 12 December 1923, following the failed putsch attempt in Munich, his former class teacher, Dr Eduard Huemer, recalled Adolf as a thin, pale youth commuting between Linz and Leonding, a boy not making full use of his talent, lacking in application, and unable to accommodate himself to school discipline. He characterized him as stubborn, high-handed, dogmatic, and hot-tempered. Strictures from his teachers were received with a scarcely concealed insolence. With his classmates he was domineering, and a leading figure in the sort of immature pranks which Huemer attributed to too great an addiction to Karl May’s Indian stories together with a tendency to waste time furthered by the daily trip from Leonding and back.
There can be little doubting that Hitler’s attitude towards his school and teachers (with one exception) was scathingly negative. He left school ‘with an elemental hatred’ towards it, and later mocked and derided his schooling and teachers. Only his history teacher, Dr Leopold Pötsch, was singled out for praise in Mein Kampf for firing Hitler’s interest through vivid narratives and tales of heroism from the German past, stirring in him the strongly emotional German-nationalist, anti-Habsburg feelings (which were in any case widely prevalent in his school, as in Linz generally).
The problems of adjustment that Adolf encountered in the Realschule in Linz were compounded by the deterioration in relations with his father and the running sore of the disputes over the boy’s future career. For Alois, the virtues of a civil service career could not be gainsaid. But all his attempts to enthuse his son met with adamant rejection. ‘I yawned and grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time,’ wrote Adolf in Mein Kampf.
The more Adolf resisted the idea, the more authoritarian and insistent his father became. Equally stubborn, when asked what he envisaged for his future, Adolf claimed he replied that he wanted to be an artist – a vision which for the dour Austrian civil servant Alois was quite unthinkable. ‘Artist, no, never as long as I live!’, Hitler has him saying. Whether the young Adolf, allegedly at the age of twelve, so plainly stipulated he wanted to be an artist may be doubted. But that there was a conflict with his father arising from his unwillingness to follow a career in the civil service, and that his father found fault with his son’s indolent and purposeless existence, in which drawing appeared to be his main interest, seems certain. Alois had worked his way up through industry, diligence, and effort from humble origins to a position of dignity and respect in the state service. His son, from a more privileged background, saw fit to do no more than dawdle away his time drawing and dreaming, would not apply himself in school, had no career path in view, and scorned the type of career which had meant everything to his father. The dispute amounted, therefore, to more than a rejection of a civil service career. It was a rejection of everything his father had stood for; and with that, a rejection of his father himself.
Adolf’s adolescence, as he commented in Mein Kampf, was ‘very painful’. With the move to the school in Linz, and the start of the rumbling conflict with his father, an important formative phase in his character development had begun. The happy, playful youngster of the primary school days had grown into an idle, resentful, rebellious, sullen, stubborn, and purposeless teenager.
When, on 3 January 1903, his father collapsed and died over his usual morning glass of wine in the Gasthaus Wiesinger, the conflict of will over Adolf ’s future was over. Alois had left his family in comfortable circumstances. And whatever emotional adjustments were needed for his widow, Klara, it is unlikely that Adolf, now the only ‘man about the house’, grieved over his father. With his father’s death, much of the parental pressure was removed. His mother did her best to persuade Adolf to comply with his father’s wishes. But she shied away from conflict and, however concerned she was about his future, was far too ready to give in to Adolf ’s whims. In any case, his continued poor school performance in itself ruled out any realistic expectation that he would be qualified for a career in the civil service.
His school record in the following two years remained mediocre. In autumn 1905, at the age of sixteen, he used illness – feigned, or most likely genuine but exaggerated – to persuade his mother that he was not fit to continue school and gladly put his schooling behind him for good with no clear future career path mapped out.
The time between leaving school in autumn 1905 and his mother’s death at the end of 1907 is passed over almost completely in Mein Kampf. In these two years, Adolf lived a life of parasitic idleness – funded, provided for, looked after, and cosseted by a doting mother, with his own room in the comfortable flat in the Humboldtstraße in Linz, which the family had moved into in June 1905. His mother, his aunt Johanna, and his little sister Paula were there to look after all his needs, to wash, clean, and cook for him. His mother even bought him a grand piano, on which he had lessons for four months between October 1906 and January 1907. He spent his time during the days drawing, painting, reading, or writing ‘poetry’; the evenings were for going to the theatre or opera; and the whole time he daydreamed and fantasized about his future as a great artist. He stayed up late into the night and slept long into the mornings. He had no clear aim in view. The indolent lifestyle, the grandiosity of fantasy, the lack of discipline for systematic work – all features of the later Hitler – can be seen in these two years in Linz. It was little wonder that Hitler came to refer to this period as ‘the happiest days which seemed to me almost like a beautiful dream’.
A description of Adolf ’s carefree life in Linz between 1905 and 1907 is provided by the one friend he had at that time, August Kubizek, the son of a Linz upholsterer with dreams of his own about becoming a great musician. Kubizek’s post-war memoirs need to be treated with care, both in factual detail and in interpretation. They are a lengthened and embellished version of recollections he had originally been commissioned by the Nazi Party to compile. Even retrospectively, the admiration in which Kubizek continued to hold his former friend coloured his judgement. But more than that, Kubizek plainly invented a great deal, built some passages around Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf, and deployed some near plagiarism to amplify his own limited memory. However, for all their weaknesses, his recollections have been shown to be a more credible source on Hitler’s youth than was once thought, in particular where they touch upon experiences related to Kubizek’s own interests in music and theatre. There can be no doubt that, whatever their deficiencies, they do contain important reflections of the young Hitler’s personality, showing features in embryo which were to be all too prominent in later years.
August Kubizek – ‘Gustl’ – was some nine months older than Adolf. They met by chance in autumn 1905 (not 1904, as Kubizek claimed) at the opera in Linz. Adolf had for some years been a fanatical admirer of Wagner, and his love of opera, especially the works of the ‘master of Bayreuth’, was shared by Kubizek. Gustl was highly impressionable; Adolf out for someone to impress. Gustl was compliant, weak-willed, subordinate; Adolf was superior, determining, dominant. Gustl felt strongly about little or nothing; Adolf had strong feelings about everything. ‘He had to speak,’ recalled Kubizek, ‘and needed someone to listen to him.’ For his part, Gustl, from his artisanal background, having attended a lower school than the young Hitler, and feeling himself therefore both socially and educationally inferior, was filled with admiration at Adolf ’s power of expression. Whether Adolf was haranguing him about the deficiencies of civil servants, school teachers, local taxation, social welfare lotteries, opera performances, or Linz public buildings, Gustl was gripped as never before. Not just what his friend had to say, but how he said it, was what he found attractive. Gustl, in self-depiction a quiet, dreamy youth, had found an ideal foil in the opinionated, cocksure, ‘know-all’ Hitler. It was a perfect partnership.
In the evenings they would go off, dressed in their fineries, to the theatre or the opera, the pale and weedy young Hitler, sporting the beginnings of a thin moustache, looking distinctly foppish in his black coat and dark hat, the image completed by a black cane with an ivory handle. After the performance, Adolf would invariably hold forth, heatedly critical of the production, or effusively rapturous. Even though Kubizek was musically more gifted and knowledgeable than Hitler, he remained the passive and submissive partner in the ‘discussions’.
Hitler’s passion for Wagner knew no bounds. A performance could affect him almost like a religious experience, plunging him into deep and mystical fantasies. Wagner amounted for him to the supreme artistic genius, the model to be emulated. Adolf was carried away by Wagner’s powerful musical dramas, his evocation of a heroic, distant, and sublimely mystical Germanic past. Lohengrin, the saga of the mysterious knight of the grail, epitome of the Teutonic hero, sent from the castle of Monsalvat by his father Parzival to rescue the wrongly condemned pure maiden, Elsa, but ultimately betrayed by her, had been his first Wagner opera, and remained his favourite.
Even more than music, the theme, when Adolf and Gustl were together, was great art and architecture. More precisely, it was Adolf as the future great artistic genius. The young, dandified Hitler scorned the notion of working to earn one’s daily bread. He enraptured the impressionable Kubizek with his visions of himself as a great artist, and Kubizek as a foremost musician. While Kubizek toiled in his father’s workshop, Adolf filled his time with drawing and dreaming. He would then meet Gustl after work, and, as the friends wandered through Linz in the evenings, would lecture him on the need to tear down, remodel, and replace the central public buildings, showing his friend countless sketches of his rebuilding plans.
The make-believe world also included Adolf’s infatuation with a girl who did not even know of his existence. Stefanie, an elegant young lady in Linz to be seen promenading through the town on the arm of her mother, and occasionally greeted by an admirer among the young officers, was for Hitler an ideal to be admired from a distance, not approached in person, a fantasy figure who would be waiting for the great artist when the right moment for their marriage arrived, after which they would live in the magnificent villa that he would design for her.
Another glimpse into the fantasy world is afforded by Adolf ’s plans for the future when, around 1906, the friends bought a lottery ticket together. Adolf was so certain they would win first prize that he designed an elaborate vision of their future residence. The two young men would live an artistic existence, tended by a middle-aged lady who could meet their artistic requirements – neither Stefanie nor any other woman of their own age figured in this vision – and would go off to Bayreuth and Vienna and make other visits of cultural value. So certain was Adolf that they would win, that his fury at the state lottery knew no bounds when nothing came of their little flutter.
In spring 1906, Adolf persuaded his mother to fund him on a first trip to Vienna, allegedly to study the picture gallery in the Court Museum, more likely to fulfil a growing ambition to visit the cultural sites of the Imperial capital. For two weeks, perhaps longer, he wandered through Vienna as a tourist taking in the city’s many attractions. With whom he stayed is unknown. The four postcards he sent his friend Gustl and his comments in Mein Kampf show how captivated he was by the grandeur of the buildings and the layout of the Ringstraße. Otherwise, he seems to have spent his time in the theatre and marvelling at the Court Opera, where Gustav Mahler’s productions of Wagner’s Tristan and The Flying Dutchman left those of provincial Linz in the shade. Nothing had changed on his return home. But the sojourn in Vienna furthered the idea, probably already growing in his mind, that he would develop his artistic career at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts.
By the summer of 1907, this idea had taken more concrete shape. Adolf was now aged eighteen but still never having earned a day’s income and continuing his drone’s life without career prospects. Despite the advice of relatives that it was about time he found a job, he had persuaded his mother to let him return to Vienna, this time with the intention of entering the Academy. Whatever her reservations, the prospect of a systematic study at the Academy in Vienna must have seemed to her an improvement on his aimless existence in Linz. And she did not need to worry about her son’s material welfare. Adolf ’s ‘Hanitante’ – Aunt Johanna – had come up with a loan of 924 Kronen to fund her nephew’s artistic studies. It gave him something like a year’s salary for a young lawyer or teacher.
By this stage, his mother was seriously ill with breast cancer. She had already been operated on in January, and in the spring and early summer was frequently treated by the Jewish family doctor, Dr Bloch. Frau Klara – now in the new family home at Urfahr, a suburb of Linz – must have been seriously worried not only about the mounting medical costs, but about her eleven-year-old daughter Paula, still at home and looked after by Aunt Johanna, and about her darling boy Adolf, still without a clear future. Adolf, described by Dr Bloch as a tall, sallow, frail-looking boy who ‘lived within himself’, was certainly worried about his mother. He settled the bill of 100 Kronen for her twenty-day stay in hospital at the start of the year. He wept when Dr Bloch had to tell him and his sister the bad news that their mother had little chance of surviving her cancer. He tended to her during her illness and was anguished at the intense pain she suffered. He had, it seems, to take responsibility for whatever decisions had to be made about her care. Despite his mother’s deteriorating condition, however, Adolf went ahead with his plans to move to Vienna. He left for the capital in early September 1907, in time to take the entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts.
Admission to the examination itself was decided on the basis of an entry test resting on assessment of pieces of work presented by the candidates. Adolf had, he later wrote, left home ‘armed with a thick pile of drawings’. He was one of 113 candidates and was allowed to proceed to the examination itself. Thirty-three candidates were excluded following this initial test. At the beginning of October, he sat the two tough three-hour examinations in which the candidates had to produce drawings on specified themes. Only twenty-eight candidates succeeded. Hitler was not among them. ‘Test drawing unsatisfactory. Few heads,’ was the verdict.
It apparently never occurred to the supremely self-confident Adolf that he might fail the entrance examination for the Academy. He had been, he wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘convinced that it would be child’s play to pass the examination … I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue.’ He sought an explanation, and was told by the Rector of the Academy that there was no doubt about his unsuitability for the school of painting, but that his talents plainly lay in architecture. Hitler left the interview, as he put it, ‘for the first time in my young life at odds with myself’. After a few days pondering his fate, he concluded, so he wrote, that the Rector’s judgement was right, and ‘that I should some day become an architect’ – not that he then or later did anything to remedy the educational deficiencies which provided a major obstacle to studying for a career in architecture. In reality, Adolf probably did not bounce back anything like so quickly as his own story suggests, and the fact that he reapplied the following year for admission to the painting school casts some doubt on the version of a lightning recognition that his future was as an architect. At any rate, the rejection by the Academy was such a body blow to his pride that he kept it a secret. He avoided telling either his friend Gustl, or his mother, of his failure.
Meanwhile, Klara Hitler lay dying. The sharp deterioration in her condition brought Adolf back from Vienna to be told by Dr Bloch, towards the end of October, that his mother’s condition was hopeless. Deeply affected by the news, Adolf was more than dutiful. Both his sister, Paula, and Dr Bloch later testified to his devoted and ‘indefatigable’ care for his dying mother. But despite Dr Bloch’s close medical attention, Klara’s health worsened rapidly during the autumn. On 21 December 1907, aged forty-seven, she passed away quietly. Though he had witnessed many deathbed scenes, recalled Dr Bloch, ‘I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.’ His mother’s death was ‘a dreadful blow’, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘particularly for me’. He felt alone and bereft at her passing. He had lost the one person for whom he had ever felt close affection and warmth.
‘Poverty and hard reality,’ Hitler later claimed, ‘now compelled me to take a quick decision. What little my father had left had been largely exhausted by my mother’s grave illness; the orphan’s pension to which I was entitled was not enough for me even to live on, and so I was faced with the problem of somehow making my own living.’ When, he continued, after her death he returned to Vienna for the third time, now to stay for some years, his old defiance and determination had come back to him, and his goal was now clear: ‘I wanted to become an architect and obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to, but only to be broken.’ He claimed he set out to overcome the obstacles, inspired by the example of his father’s rise through his own efforts from poverty to the position of a government official.
In reality, his mother’s careful housekeeping – aided by not insignificant contributions from her sister Johanna – had left more than sufficient to pay for the considerable medical costs, as well as a relatively expensive funeral. Nor was Adolf left nearly penniless. There was no question of immediately having to earn his own living. Certainly, the monthly orphans’ pension of 25 Kronen which he and his younger sister Paula – now brought up by their half-sister Angela and her husband Leo Raubal – received could scarcely provide for his upkeep in inflation-ridden Austria. And apart from interest, Adolf and Paula could not touch the inheritance from their father until their twenty-fourth year. But what his mother had left – perhaps in the region of 2,000 Kronen once the funeral expenses had been covered – was divided between the two orphaned minors. Adolf’s share, together with his orphan’s pension, was enough to provide for his upkeep in Vienna for a year without work. And on top of that, he still had the residue of his aunt’s generous loan. He scarcely had the financial security which has sometimes been attributed to him. But, all in all, his financial position was, during this time, substantially better than that of most genuine students in Vienna.
Moreover, Adolf was in less of a hurry to leave Linz than he implies in Mein Kampf. Though his sister almost forty years later stated that he moved to Vienna within a few days of their mother’s death, Adolf was still recorded as in Urfahr in mid-January and mid-February 1908. Unless, as seems unlikely, he made brief visits to Vienna between these dates, it looks as if he stayed in Urfahr for at least seven weeks after the death of his mother. The family household account-book indicates that the break with Linz was not made before May.
When he did return to Vienna, in February 1908, it was not to pursue with all vigour the necessary course of action to become an architect, but to slide back into the life of indolence, idleness, and self-indulgence which he had followed before his mother’s death. He even now persuaded Kubizek’s parents to let August leave his work in the family upholstery business to join him in Vienna in order to study music.
His failure to enter the Academy and his mother’s death, both occurring within less than four months in late 1907, amounted to a crushing double-blow for the young Hitler. He had been abruptly jolted from his dream of an effortless path to the fame of a great artist; and the sole person upon whom he depended emotionally had been lost to him at almost the same time. His artistic fantasy remained. Any alternative – such as settling down to a steady job in Linz – was plainly an abhorrent thought. A neighbour in Urfahr, the widow of the local postmaster, later recalled: ‘When the postmaster asked him one day what he wanted to do for a living and whether he wouldn’t like to join the post office, he replied that it was his intention to become a great artist. When he was reminded that he lacked the necessary funding and personal connections, he replied tersely: “Makart and Rubens worked themselves up from poor backgrounds.” ’ How he might emulate them was entirely unclear. His only hope rested upon retaking the entrance examination for the Academy the following year. He must have known his chances were not high. But he did nothing to enhance them. Meanwhile, he had to get by in Vienna.
Despite the drastic alteration in his prospects and circumstances, Adolf’s lifestyle – the drifting existence in an egoistic fantasy-world – remained unchanged. But the move from the cosy provincialism of Linz to the political and social melting-pot of Vienna nevertheless marked a crucial transition. The experiences in the Austrian capital were to leave an indelible mark on the young Hitler and to shape decisively the formation of his prejudices and phobias.
2
Drop-out
I
The city where Hitler was to live for the next five years was an extraordinary place. More than any other European metropolis, Vienna epitomized tensions – social, cultural, political – that signalled the turn of an era, the death of the nineteenth-century world. They were to mould the young Hitler.
Anticipating that he would be studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, he had in late September or the beginning of October 1907 rented a small room on the second floor of a house in Stumpergasse 31, near the Westbahnhof in Vienna, owned by a Czech woman, Frau Zakreys. This is where he returned, some time between 14 and 17 February 1908, to pick up where he had left off before his mother’s death.
He was not long alone. We can recall that he had persuaded August Kubizek’s parents to let their son join him in Vienna to carry out his studies to become a musician. Kubizek’s father had been most reluctant to let his son go off with someone he regarded as no more than a failure at school and who thought himself above learning a proper trade. But Adolf had prevailed. On 18 February, he sent a postcard to his friend, urging him to come as quickly as possible. ‘Dear Friend,’ he wrote, ‘am anxiously expecting news of your arrival. Write soon so that I can prepare everything for your festive welcome. The whole of Vienna is awaiting you.’ A postscript added: ‘Beg you again, come soon.’ Four days later, Gustl’s tearful parents bade him goodbye, and he left to join his friend in Vienna. Adolf met a tired Kubizek at the station that evening, took him back to Stumpergasse to stay the first night, but, typically, insisted on immediately showing him all the sights of Vienna. How could someone come to Vienna and go to bed without first seeing the Court Opera House? So Gustl was dragged off to view the opera building, St Stephen’s cathedral (which could scarcely be seen through the mist), and the lovely church of St Maria am Gestade. It was after midnight when they returned to Stumpergasse, and later still when an exhausted Kubizek fell asleep with Hitler still haranguing him about the grandeur of Vienna.
The next few months were to be a repeat, on a grander scale, of the lifestyle of the two youths in Linz. An early search for lodgings for Gustl was rapidly given up, and Frau Zakreys persuaded to swap her larger room and move into the cramped little room that Hitler had occupied. Adolf and his friend now occupied the same room, paying double the rent (10 Kronen each) that Hitler had paid for his earlier room. Within the next few days, Kubizek learnt that he had passed the entrance examination and been accepted for study at the Vienna Conservatoire. He rented a grand piano which took up most of the available space in the room, just allowing Hitler the three paces to do his usual stomping backwards and forwards. Apart from the piano, the room was furnished with simple necessities: two beds, a commode, a wardrobe, a washstand, a table, and two chairs.
Kubizek settled down into a regular pattern of music study. What Hitler was up to was less clear to his friend. He stayed in bed in the mornings, was missing when Kubizek came back from the Conservatoire at lunchtimes, hung around the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace on fine afternoons, pored over books, fantasized over grandiose architectural and writing plans, and spent a good deal of time drawing until late into the night. Gustl’s puzzlement about how his friend could combine so much leisure time with studying at the Academy of Fine Arts was ended only after some considerable time. A show of irritation about Kubizek practising his piano scales led to a full-scale row between the two friends about study timetables and ended in Hitler finally admitting in fury that he had been rejected by the Academy. When Gustl asked him what, then, he was going to do, Hitler rounded on him: ‘What now, what now? … Are you starting too: what now?’ The truth was, Hitler had no idea where he was going or what he would do. He was drifting aimlessly.
Kubizek had plainly touched a raw nerve. Adolf had for mercenary reasons not told his family about his failure to enter the Academy. Otherwise, his guardian back in Linz, Josef Mayrhofer, would probably have denied him the 25 Kronen a month he received as his share of the orphans’ pension. And he would have come under even more pressure to find a job. But why did he deceive his friend? For a teenager to fail to pass an extremely tough entrance examination is in itself neither unusual nor shameful. But Adolf evidently could not bear to tell his friend, to whom he had always claimed to be so superior in all matters of artistic judgement, and whose own studies at the Conservatoire had started so promisingly, of his rejection. The blow to his self-esteem had been profound. And the bitterness showed. According to Kubizek, he would fly off the handle at the slightest thing. His loss of self-confidence could flare up in an instant into boundless anger and violent denunciation of all who he thought were persecuting him. The tirades of hate directed at everything and everybody were those of an outsized ego desperately wanting acceptance and unable to come to terms with his personal insignificance, with failure and mediocrity.
Adolf had still not given up hope of entering the Academy. But, typically, he took no steps to ensure that his chances would be better a second time round. Systematic preparation and hard work were as foreign to the young Hitler as they would be to the later dictator. Instead, his time was largely spent in dilettante fashion, as it had been in Linz, devising grandiose schemes shared only with the willing Kubizek – fantasy plans that usually arose from sudden whims and bright ideas and were dropped almost as soon as they had begun.
Apart from architecture, Hitler’s main passion, as it had been in Linz, was music. Particular favourites, certainly in later years, were Beethoven, Bruckner, Liszt, and Brahms. He greatly enjoyed, too, the operettas of Johann Strauß and Franz Lehár. Wagner was, of course, the non plus ultra. Adolf and Gustl were at the opera most nights, paying their 2 Kronen to gain the standing place that they had often queued for hours to obtain. They saw operas by Mozart, Beethoven, and the Italian masters Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini as well as the main works of Verdi and Puccini. But for Hitler only German music counted. He could not join in the enthusiasm for Verdi or Puccini operas, playing to packed houses in Vienna. Adolf’s passion for Wagner, as in Linz, knew no bounds. Now he and his friend were able to see all Wagner’s operas performed at one of the best opera houses in Europe. In the short time they were together, Kubizek reckoned they saw Lohengrin ten times. ‘For him,’ remarked Kubizek, ‘a second-rate Wagner was a hundred times better than a first-class Verdi.’ Kubizek was of a different mind; but to no avail. Adolf would not rest until his friend agreed to forget about going to see Verdi at the Court Opera and accompany him to a Wagner performance at the less highbrow Popular Opera House. ‘When it was a matter of a Wagner performance, Adolf would stand no contradiction.’
‘When I hear Wagner,’ Hitler himself much later recounted, ‘it seems to me that I hear rhythms of a bygone world.’ It was a world of Germanic myth, of great drama and wondrous spectacle, of gods and heroes, of titanic struggle and redemption, of victory and of death. It was a world where the heroes were outsiders who challenged the old order, like Rienzi, Tannhäuser, Stolzing, and Siegfried; or chaste saviours like Lohengrin and Parsifal. Betrayal, sacrifice, redemption, and heroic death were Wagnerian themes which would also preoccupy Hitler down to the Götterdämmerung of his regime in 1945. And it was a world created with grandiose vision by an artist of genius, an outsider and revolutionary, all-or-nothing refuser of compromise, challenger of the existing order, dismissive of the need to bow to the bourgeois ethic of working for a living, surmounting rejection and persecution, overcoming adversity to attain greatness. It was little wonder that the fantasist and drop-out, the rejected and unrecognized artistic genius in the dingy room in the Stumpergasse, could find his idol in the master of Bayreuth. Hitler, the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure, wanted to live like a Wagnerian hero. He wanted to become himself a new Wagner – the philosopher-king, the genius, the supreme artist. In Hitler’s mounting identity crisis following his rejection at the Academy of Arts, Wagner was for Hitler the artistic giant he had dreamed of becoming but knew he could never emulate, the incarnation of the triumph of aesthetics and the supremacy of art.
II
The strange coexistence of the young Hitler and Kubizek continued into midsummer 1908. During those months, almost the only other person apart from his friend with whom Hitler had regular contact was his landlady, Frau Zakreys. Nor did Kubizek and Hitler have any joint acquaintances. Adolf regarded his friendship with Gustl as exclusive, allowing him no other friendships. When Gustl brought a young woman, one of a small number of his music pupils, back to his room, Hitler, thinking she was a girlfriend, was beside himself with rage. Kubizek’s explanation that it was simply a matter of coaching a pupil in musical harmony merely provoked a tirade about the pointlessness of women studying. In Kubizek’s view, Hitler was outrightly misogynist. He pointed out Hitler’s satisfaction that women were not permitted in the stalls of the opera. Apart from his distant admiration for Stefanie in Linz, Kubizek knew of Hitler having no relations with any woman during the years of their acquaintance in both Linz and Vienna. This would not alter during his remaining years in the Austrian capital. None of the accounts of Hitler’s time in the Men’s Home gives a hint of any women in his life. When his circle of acquaintances got round to discussing women – and, doubtless, their own former girlfriends and sexual experiences – the best Hitler could come up with was a veiled reference to Stefanie, who had been his ‘first love’, though ‘she never knew it, because he never told her’. The impression left with Reinhold Hanisch, an acquaintance from that time, was that ‘Hitler had very little respect for the female sex, but very austere ideas about relations between men and women. He often said that, if men only wanted to, they could adopt a strictly moral way of living.’ This was entirely in line with the moral code preached by the Austrian pan-German movement associated with Georg Ritter von Schönerer, whose radical brand of German nationalism and racial antisemitism Hitler had admired since his Linz days. Celibacy until the twenty-fifth year, the code advocated, was healthy, advantageous to strength of will, and the basis of physical or mental high achievement. The cultivation of corresponding dietary habits was advised. Eating meat and drinking alcohol – seen as stimulants to sexual activity – were to be avoided. And upholding the strength and purity of the Germanic race meant keeping free of the moral decadence and danger of infection which accompanied consorting with prostitutes, who should be left to clients of ‘inferior’ races. Here was ideological justification enough for Hitler’s chaste lifestyle and prudish morals. But, in any case, certainly in the time in Vienna after he parted company with Kubizek, Hitler was no ‘catch’ for women.
Probably, he was frightened of women – certainly of their sexuality. Hitler later described his own ideal woman as ‘a cute, cuddly, naïve little thing – tender, sweet, and stupid’. His assertion that a woman ‘would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling’ may well have been a compensatory projection of his own sexual complexes.
Kubizek was adamant that Hitler was sexually normal (though on the basis of his own account it is difficult to see how he was in a position to judge). This was also the view of doctors who at a much later date thoroughly examined him. Biologically, it may well have been so. Claims that sexual deviance arising from the absence of a testicle were the root of Hitler’s personality disorder rest on a combination of psychological speculation and dubious evidence provided by a Russian autopsy after the alleged capture of the burnt remains of his body in Berlin. And stories about his Vienna time such as that of his alleged obsession with and attempted rape of a model engaged to a half-Jew, and his resort to prostitutes, derive from a single source – the self-serving supposed recollections of Josef Greiner, who may have known Hitler briefly in Vienna – with no credence and which can be regarded as baseless. However, Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.
Hitler’s prudishness, shored up by Schönerian principles, was to a degree merely in line with middle-class outward standards of morality in the Vienna of his time. These standards had been challenged by the openly erotic art of Gustav Klimt and literature of Arthur Schnitzler. But the solid bourgeois puritanism prevailed – at least as a thin veneer covering the seamier side of a city teeming with vice and prostitution. Where decency demanded that women were scarcely allowed even to show an ankle, Hitler’s embarrassment – and the rapidity with which he fled with his friend – when a prospective landlady during the search for a room for Kubizek let her silk dressing-gown fall open to reveal that she was wearing nothing but a pair of knickers was understandable. But his prudishness went far beyond this. It amounted, according to Kubizek’s account, to a deep disgust and repugnance at sexual activity. Hitler avoided contact with women, meeting with cold indifference during visits to the opera alleged attempts by young women, probably seeing him as something of an oddity, to flirt with or tease him. He was repelled by homosexuality. He refrained from masturbation. Prostitution horrified, but fascinated, him. He associated it with venereal disease, which petrified him. Following a visit to the theatre one evening to see Frank Wedekind’s play Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), which dealt with sexual problems of youth, Hitler suddenly took Kubizek’s arm and led him into Spittelberggasse to see at first hand the red-light district, or ‘sink of iniquity’ as he called it. Adolf took his friend not once, but twice, along the row of lit windows behind which scantily clad women advertised their wares and touted for custom. His voyeurism was then cloaked in middle-class self-righteousness by the lecture he proceeded to give Kubizek on the evils of prostitution. Later, in Mein Kampf, he was to link the Jews – echoing a commonp